What this site is

Kippu Japan works out what travelling in Japan costs and how to get places, using numbers rather than adjectives. A kippu is a ticket, which is close enough to what this site is about: the decisions you make just before you spend money.

Where the numbers come from

Fares and pass prices come from the operators — JR West, Kintetsu and the rest — and nowhere else. Every page that carries a price also carries the date it was last checked and a link to the page it was checked against. When something has not been verified yet, the page says so plainly instead of guessing.

Where a figure exists only in Japanese — deer population counts, recorded bloom dates, festival schedules — we translate the original source rather than repeating what other English sites have said.

Photographs

The photographs on this site are not ours yet. They are borrowed from Wikimedia Commons under the licence named beneath each one, with the photographer credited on the page and again on our credits page. We resize and re-encode them for the web and change nothing else.

They are there because a page of tables is harder to read than a page with a picture in it, not because we have been to the places. As we photograph each subject ourselves, the borrowed one comes down. The Nara Park subjects can be taken on any day and will go first. Mount Yoshino in blossom is available for about two weeks each April, so that one will stay borrowed the longest, and we would rather say so than imply otherwise.

How it makes money

Some links to rail passes, tours and accommodation earn a commission at no extra cost to you. That never changes a recommendation. The pass calculator on this site frequently tells people to buy nothing at all, which costs us money and is exactly why it is worth trusting.

Corrections

Prices change and we will sometimes be behind. If something here is wrong, tell us and we will fix it and re-date the page.